A federal appeals court is allowing President Donald Trump to maintain control over thousands of members of California’s National Guard.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request from Trump to lift, for now, a lower-court ruling that had required the president to relinquish control of roughly 4,000 guardsmen from the Golden State that he had federalized to beef up security in Los Angeles amid unrest over immigration enforcement.
The court said in an unsigned ruling “that it is likely that the President lawfully exercised his statutory authority” under the federal law he invoked to federalize the guardsmen earlier this month, rejecting arguments pushed by California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom that Trump had violated federal law when he seized control of part of his state’s militia.
The panel of judges who issued Thursday’s ruling is comprised of two Trump appointees and an appointee of former President Joe Biden.
Last week, US District Judge Charles Breyer directed the president to relinquish control of the guardsmen after concluding that Trump had violated several provisions of the law he leaned on in order to take control of the troops, including one that requires presidents to issue an order “through the governor” when they want to federalize state troops.
The appeals court briefly put Breyer’s ruling on hold shortly after it was issued, and Thursday’s ruling from the 9th Circuit extends that pause while the legal challenge plays out. California has the option of asking the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis.
Though the ruling hands a significant loss to Newsom, the appeals court still rebuffed some of the arguments Justice Department lawyers had presented to the judges earlier this week, including that courts lacked authority to second-guess a president’s determination that certain requisite factual predicates had been met to justify his decision to invoke the law at issue in the case.
But the court concluded that its “review of that decision must be highly deferential” to the commander in chief.
“Under a highly deferential standard of review, Defendants have presented facts to allow us to conclude that the President had a colorable basis for invoking” the law, the judges said in the ruling, going on to note that some protesters in California had targeted federal property or agents. “Those activities significantly impeded the ability of federal officers to execute the laws,” the court said.
In leaning on the law, 10 USC 12406, Trump pointed in part to one provision of it that said a president can federalize a state’s National Guard if they are “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
The appeals court on Thursday also rejected another key argument California had made in its challenge to Trump’s actions: that he violated a procedural aspect of the law that requires presidents to issue an order “through the governor” when they want to federalize state troops. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the state’s top general, not Newsom, Trump’s June 7 memo calling up members of the militia.
But since the California general is an “agent” of the governor, the appeals court said, Trump and Hegseth’s actions “likely met the procedural requirement.”
The ruling comes as the situation in Los Angeles has calmed significantly since last week, when the legal fracas over Trump’s decision to send troops to the streets of America’s second-largest city began after a weekend of unrest there.
More legal wrangling over how Trump is actually using the guardsmen on the ground in Los Angeles is expected to continue during a hearing Breyer, of the federal court in San Francisco, has set for Friday afternoon.
This story and headline been updated with additional developments.
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